Guest essay by Eric Worrall

But even the “mock” classroom climate negotiations can’t agree on a plan.

Climate change: how business school students play their part
Can a mock UN negotiation really prepare masters in management students to help save the world?

Amy Bell

With less than an hour to go in a two-day series of climate change negotiations, Adele Grundmann found herself in a deadlock. Her hopes of an agreement for her market mechanism were about to be dashed.

The US and Chinese delegations had pushed to include fossil fuels in the sustainable development mechanism. This was non-negotiable for Grundmann, who was representing Canada, as these fuels would then qualify for emissions-trading schemes. Risking everything as the countdown began, she threatened to not sign the agreement.

It may not have been the real UN Conference of Parties, but this live simulation at the University of Cologne was nonetheless emotionally gripping. The two-day conference took place in May as the final part of the Model UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) course run by Cems, the international alliance of business schools. Each student represented a country, non-governmental organisation (NGO) or industry group, and worked together to reach a consensus on how to limit carbon emissions to well below 2C.

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Now in its 11th year, the UNFCCC programme is designed to prepare masters in management students for the challenge of climate change, teaching them the latest science, policy and the role of business in tackling global warming. “Students come in with a frustration that politics is not ambitious enough when it comes to climate change,” says Johanna Bocklet, who teaches the programme at the University of Cologne. “But when they step into the role of government groups and NGOs they come to understand how complex the negotiations are. We teach them a little realism.”

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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/d1f7baa4-b2f2-11e9-b2c2-1e116952691a

If the kids think a few days of mock negotiations are difficult, wait until they try actually implementing the “solutions” advocated by climate action proponents like the UNFCCC.

The fact is the greens won. The world was persuaded at least a decade ago to make a genuine effort to replace fossil fuel with renewables.

But the world has not gone green. Renewable have made and continue to make very little impact on global energy production.

The ongoing failure has puzzled and angered climate action advocates, who have invented elaborate big oil conspiracy theories to explain the lack of progress.

But the truth is fossil fuel interests would have won this battle even without climate skeptics and political lobby groups, because it simply isn’t possible to achieve the societal transformation which greens want.

In 2014 top google engineers discovered to their horror there is no viable pathway to replace fossil fuel with renewables, even when they considered fantasy technologies like self erecting wind turbines.

Greens are refusing to accept the inevitability of failure, even Google management can’t bring themselves to accept the findings of their own engineers. The only question is, how much damage will be done and how much money will be wasted, until the world stops listening to greens, and gives up the hopeless quest for renewable nirvana.